Unintelligence

Staggering special effects combine with a stultifying lack of logic in The Creator, a wannabe chin-stroker that aspires to heady speculative fiction but merely traffics in trite allusions to Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, Kundun, and any other film with cinematic philosophizing that this quizzical epic ineptly blenders into blandness. Cue the “more human than human” shoutout, imperial military vehicles steamrolling through rice-paddy fields, and U.S. soldiers shooting a row of religious robots  in the head.

THE CREATOR ★ (1/5 stars)
Directed by: Gareth Edwards
Written by: Gareth Edwards, Chris Weitz
Starring: John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Madeline Voyles, Allison Janney, Ken Watanabe
Running time: 133 mins

CGI-loving filmmaker Gareth Edwards is best known for making Rogue One: A Star Wars Story—and for also having to step aside while Disney hired Oscar-nominated writer/director Tony Gilroy to iron out its patchy story and reshoot significant chunks of the film. Too bad Gilroy didn’t offer the same services for Edwards’ latest head-scratcher, a nonsensical paean to our inevitable A.I. overlords who apparently just want to move to Tibet and become Buddhist monks.

At its best, and most simplistic, this sci-fi spectacle is a cautionary tale for humanity’s capacity to dominate and destroy what it doesn’t completely understand. At its worst, this insultingly shallow look at how humans will interface with sentient robots posits that we should cradle them like our own instead of be even remotely wary of a computer-powered consciousness that might just be eternal.

The softball plot is pure Manichean paranoia: in the year 2060, after decades of what seem like an improbably peaceful co-existence with the human race, the so-called Simulants unexpectedly detonate a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles. America banishes all A.I., and the exiles retreat to the Republic of New Asia, which welcomes them with open arms and continues to develop their technology. And that sets off an endless war where, five years later, America is roaming the earth—or, more specifically, the Republic of New Asia—trying to eradicate the remaining A.I. “We will never stop hunting them,” affirms some gravelly-voiced general to a joint session of Congress.

Okay, stop. I have so many geopolitical questions, and Edwards doesn’t seem to supply any answers. Why would the rest of the world allow America to just endlessly hunt down A.I.—especially the folks in the Republic of New Asia? And what’s the deal with the Republic of New Asia? Why would China agree to power-sharing with other nations? Why wouldn’t the entire region just be an engorged Sino-state? Is Asia somehow more peaceful and less paranoid than America? Seriously? The same area that’s rife with dictators and a troubling history of persistent regional genocide? They’re not freaked out by harboring the machines that set off a bomb in L.A.?

By the way, the robots never really explain or defend their actions in L.A.. Spoiler: we later learn it’s not necessarily their fault, but the Creator doesn’t develop that revelation either.  Also, the robots, in their evolution or iteration or whatever you want to call their next-gen product refreshes, at some point got synthetic skin and bodies that are essentially indistinguishable from human beings—except for this preposterous donut hole in their heads. Design flaw? Cool party trick so drunk people can skull-fuck robots with their fists? We’ll never know.

Anyway, robots wear clothes and do their very best to walk, talk, act, and look like humans. Again, why? They can take any form. In fact, there are other A.I. which look very robotic, except for a few flourishes to make them anthropomorphic—like moving mandibles on their head that mimic a mouth. But why does a robot need moving mandibles to speak? They’re robots. They can just have a little speaker for a mouth. Why complicate it with moving parts? Bad engineering, or a creepy way to make robots look like insects? The world-building in this movie makes no sense.

Back to the plot: John David Washington plays Joshua, an undercover U.S. agent living on what looks like a vacation beach in Thailand with Maya (Gemma Chan), his beautiful pregnant wife. But then American special forces suddenly invade, hunting down someone called Nirmata, the Nepalese word for “creator.” The U.S. and Joshua have intel that A.I. and their human sympathizers—namely Nirmata—are developing a superweapon code-named Alpha-Omega that will finally defeat America’s imperialist actions. But whatever it is will have to neutralize a death-star-lurking space cruiser called NOMAD, a bone-shaped vessel that shoots sheets of high-intensity light onto the earth’s surface, searching it for A.I. like an infra-red flashlight scanning bedsheets for errant jism.

Turns out that the Alpha-Omega superweapon is a 6-year-old girl (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) who can magically cause power outages when she moves her hand like she’s jerking an imaginary accordion. So Joshua finds her and weirdly wins her trust enough so that he can sort-of kidnap her without her getting upset—kind of a Thai version of Stockholm Syndrome, I guess. And Joshua, who has hated robots ever since they killed his family and blew off his arm and leg with that L.A. nuke, finds himself caring for the girl he nicknames Alphie.

On his trail: the menacing and mendacious Colonel Howell, a bloodthirsty role that someone hilariously thought would be perfect for Allison Janney. It’s not. The Oscar-winning Janney is always excellent but completely wrong to play this warmongering weirdo, and elicited occasional giggles from the audience at my screening.

Among film’s other oddities: a soldier droid having a puff and watching a hologram of a stripper robot. Does A.I. get horny? Does A.I. get stoned? Also, you can download someone’s brain activity onto a supercharged USB stick and plug that person into a robot, essentially merging human and A.I. seamlessly. Which Janney is totally cool with, despite her general A.I. disgust.

This whole film is so misguided and naïve, and leads to a climactic scene where Joshua and Alphie inevitably invade NOMAD and kind-of disable its powers when Alphie runs like hell to a special room with an enormous hologram of the Earth and sits in the middle of it. Also on NOMAD: a strange room where Joshua has to fight off robotic Doc Ock tentacles. Neither of these moments come with any explanations. But I guess they look cool, so that’s enough?

 A visually impressive bauble designed by a special-effects savant that’s more interested in making cool kinetic moments of tech thrills than he is in coherent, emotional, logical and profound mythmaking, The Creator is a preposterous misfire. Edwards knows how to make a pretty picture, but he really should stay away from writing scripts. He’s shooting for the moon in a rocket ship made of balsa wood.